Ello

Will perhaps elaborate on them more later but the thoughts aren't too funny and we all know this is a humor blog right? Anyway, on Monday I went to the Yayoi Kasuma’s Infinity Mirror exhibit with a bunch of people. I actually don’t have as many thoughts about it as I thought I would but it was a genuinely interesting exhibit. The hard part was that they only gave you like 20 seconds inside each part of the exhibit and it took like a good fifteen minutes of waiting in line to get into the rooms. This also led to me taking some really shitty pictures lmao. So I brought my camera because obviously I wanted to snap some pics but I’m still stuck with manual focus on that bad boy so 20 seconds is pretty much how long it takes for me to get a picture in focus which is real tough because first of all I didn’t know what I wanted my subject to be in any of the rooms and compounding that fact was my inability to focus on like anything. The bokeh in my pictures look great!!!!! But in the context of the exhibit I didn’t get anything too great. I was also stunted by the size of the rooms and then the fact that I only brought a 50 mm which I fuckin love the 50 mm but bringing a fixed lens in a small room is tough it’s tough I just gotta admit it. So anyway, I thought I had gotten better at focusing on the camera but the learning process continues. I will see my cousin in New York at some point so maybe he will finally teach me the secrets to this camera he gave me lmao.

Anyway, while I was on the bus ride up to New York on Tuesday I took a very uncomfortable three hour nap which left my neck pretty sore and wondering how fast my sister could get to New York so she could adjust it. But more importantly, I also got hungry being up so damn early that I took out two nature valley granola bars and I guess I forgot the kind of strength it takes to eat them because as soon as I opened the pack and tried to take my first bite my teeth shattered. I believe they call them nature valley bars because they are actually just finding diamonds in the obscure valleys and feeding them to us under the guise of granola bars. I just don’t understand why they’re so strong????? Has anyone done a tensile strength test on one before? I am currently taking a strength of materials class and I just wanna say that I think some of the structures we’re building out of A36 steel should be built out of nature valley bars instead. Like fuck I was pretty much putting all my effort and concentration into eating that two pack. I couldn’t multitask on my phone at all???? Are these supposed to be for hikers who want a snack while scaling the mountains of the world? There is no way they can safely eat nature valley bars while hiking that’s actually just so irresponsible they’ll die in a second. If anything, they serve better as weapons against possible beasts that hikers may encounter on their journeys through the mountains. Let me know if you’ve ever chipped a tooth or perhaps nailed together a desk with a nature valley before in the comments below.

So I actually wrote those first two paragraphs before Amitav, Priya, Eileen, and I got to New York but now three of us are on the bus back from the Big ol’ Apple and the first thing I will say is that we never met up with my cousin due to time constraints and other activities so I never got to learn the secrets of my camera but I did become much much better at using the dials to control the settings. We took a bunch of pictures, or I took a bunch of pictures, and many of them are very above average if I do say so myself. Obviously I still fucked up the focus every now and then but for the most part I got to capture what I wanted to and that feels really good. I think my eye for pictures is getting better too but that’s pretty subjective but anyway it’s not subjective because I’m saying I did get better so that’s that on that. We spent a lot of time at the Met so that’s my second art museum this break but the Met is so fucking large like do people get lost in there? Have they ever found a dead body in a corner of the Met they forgot about? Has anyone considered having a marathon path inside the Met seeing as there’s so much to it? I assume you reach some kind of enlightenment or idk gain like at least a temporary pretentiousness power up once you’ve successfully gone through the entire museum which only like two people probably have. Also, after visiting the Met I’ve decided I want a Jackson Pollock piece for my apartment but not like a print like the real thing so… how do I… acquire one………………………………… If someone wants to cast a spell so that suddenly curiously I just so happen to have an original Jackson Pollock piece hanging on my wall when I get back to the apartment I would be all for it.

I am trying to think of what else happened in New York that sparked a lot of thoughts but honestly I think we were just walking so much in unknown areas that the kind of thoughts I have while walking at school weren’t happening. Like I was inherently a less pensive power walker in New York due to my need to concentrate on which fuckin way is 8th Ave and how come we always end up at 6th Ave instead of 8th unbelievable. Oh lmao my first Airbnb experience was an experience for sure. The setup of the whole house was actually really odd because upon first entrance it seemed like it was a duplex of sorts and that’s how I kind of envisioned it for the entirety of the trip like one side had three rooms and the other three rooms but they all just shared like one common house entrance. And so there was a kitchen on our side and I assumed there was a kitchen on the other side as well but just as we left the place to make our trek back to the bus stop we opened the fridge and saw that there were boxes for each of the six rooms in one fridge which has to mean that there’s only one kitchen for the entire house but that’s so wild because like how do six rooms evenly share one kitchen? Not from an Airbnb perspective because we didn’t touch the kitchen while we were there but from a living perspective like one kitchen for six rooms is pushing it. One fridge to six people????? Xing has trouble with her fridge and there’s only four people in her apartment. I guess I’m just trying to grapple with the design of this house and who thought it’d be feasible this way? So that’s one thing the other thing was that the shower did not have hot water which was like…………………. it’s not hot enough in New York for this to be a thing. Cold showers don’t help anyone!!!!! I just find it interesting that AJ has gotten such great reviews, none of which mentioned the cold ass showers, and yet we go and suddenly the pipes have never heard of temperatures above 32 degrees F. I’m just saying that the one thing I am excited to return to are hot showers like at least I know how to work my bathroom at home!!!!! Other than that the Big Gorgeous Room in Astoria wasn’t all that bad and it was really cheap so.

Oh lmao I’m surprised I have another story about this but we went to this place called Saigon Shack in East Village for dinner on Tuesday which is Viet food obviously and like they’re pretty well known for their pho and there was a pretty decent wait for it during peak dinner hours which for New York is like 9 pm, further showing you how fake time is. Anyway anyway, we were waiting for our table and these white people were discussing the menu and god one of them was like raving about the pho right and I was like that’s right white boy look at what it’s like to have a rich culture. But my smugness wore off very quickly when the person they were talking to asked if it was similar to ramen!!!!!!!! And you know what they said???? “Yeah I don’t think they’re that different.” Is ramen the baseline noodle dish that all white people know of and thus compare every subsequent noodle soup they are so blessed to be eating to it? Like okay noodles and broth but like what’s similar about the two beyond that? The broths are so different how can you eat both and not realize that much? We’re not even talking about the type of noodles used yet or garnish or anything but anyway this is just another case of the audacity of white people in how they consume any non-white food. It’s one thing to like one more than another but to say they’re both pretty much the same? If I am within earshot of the conversation just know I’ll be writing a whole paragraph about the caucacity (caucasian audacity) on my blog within the next week. The caucaucity of all it though, honestly.

I could write more because there’s still one hour of this bus ride left but this post is long as shit so I’m gonna go ahead and free anyone still reading from their confines. I’m sure I’ll think of some obscure story from New York to add to a future post so with that, as always, stay tuned for the drama of it all.